PLANNING FOR A SUSTAINABLE EUROPE? - TU Berlin

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Once the “Missing Links” storyline was in full force, its promoters did not have to
even bother pretending to work towards a more equitable, more sustainable Europe. In a
report commissioned for the European Parliament, Piodi (1997:24-25) notes that the
Christopherson Report in fact argues that “improved access to the central poles of activity
of the Union will help boost competitiveness of the regions concerned and the
undertakings located there” which he correctly unveils as meaning that the TENs, from
their outset, were going to fundamentally contradict EU cohesion development goals:
[T]he Christophersen report frankly admits the existence of a circumstance which has
in some circles been seen as a breach of Article 129b of the Treaty, namely the priority
given to infrastructure creation in the Union's central regions rather than in the
peripheral and island regions.
The same dynamic continued when the EU started to address the issue of
enlarging the TENs eastward. Very quickly, the rhetoric switched from a talk about
network extensions to that of corridor expansion. Long before the Transport
Infrastructure Needs Assessment (TINA) for the candidate countries was finished in
1999, the EU and the Candidate countries had already agreed on a set of Pan-European
Corridors who were to receive priority assistance. So once again, the priority focus was
on privileged “missing links” representing major trade routes between the various capital
cities, and not on an integrated, sustainable development of the networks as a whole. The
EU attempted to sell the corridors as a forerunner for a larger network, but the reality
remains that these links will skew the network and further reshape European space to
improve accessibility mostly between key links, and not equally across space:
These ten pan-European transport corridors are intended to improve trade and mobility
within Europe. The concept of the transport corridors is based on the same content and
objectives as the trans-European transport networks within the EU and represents the
forerunner of a Pan-European transport network. The investment requirement for these